CCH Pounder: Coming of Age on 'NCIS: New Orleans' Javascript must be enabled to use this site. Please enable Javascript in your browser and try again. × Search search POPULAR SEARCHES SUGGESTED LINKS Join AARP for just $9 per year when you sign up for a 5-year term. Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Leaving AARP.org Website You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply. Close

CCH Pounder Coming of Age on NCIS

At 65 the late-breaking star hits a career high with a No 1 TV show for grownups

Actress CCH Pounder walks the runway at the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women Red Dress Collection fashion show in February. Kristina Bumphrey/Starpix/Rex/Shutterstock Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. While explaining cadaver clues to NCIS investigators such as Scott Bakula, 63, she can flash the most withering, sardonic gaze this side of (to whom she lost a career-making role on The West Wing, settling instead for the HUD secretary part). She’s been a familiar, often rather smart and judgmental character in four Emmy-nominated roles (on The X-Files, ER, The Shield and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency). You’ve also seen her be intimidating on Law & Order: SVU, L.A. Law and Sons of Anarchy. And this December she’ll reprise her role as Mo’at in the sequel to Hollywood’s all-time No. 1 hit, Avatar. CCH Pounder plays coroner Loretta Wade on "NCIS: New Orleans." Sam Lothridge/CBS In her youth, she was cast older, making aging on-screen a breeze. “When you play people in their 40s in your 20s, by the time you get to 65, it’s like, ‘Man, I played that when I was 35!’ It just takes less makeup to make me look the way I do now. Before, makeup applied those lines. Now it's like, ‘OK, just pat her down and send her on her way.’ ” The keys to her success are that resonant voice (heard on the audiobook Grow Old Along With Me: The Best Is Yet to Be, which lost the Grammy to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village in 1997) and a theater-trained work ethic. “I never stopped learning,” she says. Flowers & Gifts 25% off sitewide and 30% off select items See more Flowers & Gifts offers > Her role as the Big Easy’s counterpart to original NCIS coroner David McCallum (a former man from U.N.C.L.E.) on NCIS: New Orleans gave her a chance for character expansion, but she almost turned it down. “I’ll be honest. I just didn’t think that CBS could sustain yet another NCIS,” she says. And there was another problem: Black actors can get sidelined even when playing top cops or presidents because the roles are often generic and not fully rounded characters. And that can spell trouble on a police procedural, which tends to value plot over character exploration. “We play a person in authority, but with no relations, no daughter, no husband, no nothing. Just a judge or a policeman sitting behind a desk,” Pounder says, of fellow black actors. "Give them a family member, give them a flaw, give them something else to create the humanness of the character! So we've gotten to that place where now that is not the issue.” As Wade on NCIS: New Orleans, Pounder gets to have friends like Sebastian (Rob Kerkovich), a lab assistant who hurts her by taking a gun-packing agent’s job, and a reformist mayoral candidate (Amanda Warren of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), plus gets to experience deep family issues. “Later on in life, she adopts two young men and pulls them out of the foster care system, and suddenly is a parent. There’s no history of her having a husband. I don’t know if that'll show up later. But she has those children to deal with,” Pounder says. AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe More on entertainment AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe AARP VALUE & MEMBER BENEFITS See more Health & Wellness offers > See more Flights & Vacation Packages offers > See more Finances offers > See more Health & Wellness offers > SAVE MONEY WITH THESE LIMITED-TIME OFFERS